The Beauty of Humanity Movement (96 page)

He’d boiled onions and chicken bones and lime leaves he plucked from a tree by the lake until the tree was left naked. He floated chunks of taro in water and fed five to ten faithful regulars a broth too weak to be called soup.

Then, one morning twenty-three months after H
ng had last seen Ðạo and his colleagues, Phan Khôi, the aging revolutionary who had edited
Nhân Van
, appeared at the entrance to H
ng’s shop. Phan Khôi, who had always struck H
ng as imposing, now looked as shrivelled and harmless as a one-hundred-and-ten-year-old walnut. His eyes had sunk deep into his skull. He had no teeth with which to chew and no tongue left with which to speak.

“You’ll have some broth, won’t you?” said H
ng, trying to encourage him to take a bowl, but Phan Khôi shook his head and waved the bowl away. It was as if he simply wanted to be seen, that was all, and when he vanished that morning as suddenly as he’d appeared, H
ng was left to wonder if he had just been visited by a ghost.

But two days later the ghost returned and so too, eventually, the fewest words.

“
This is the world after the end
,” Phan Khôi struggled to say, his voice a gurgled whisper in the dark backroom of H
ng’s shop. “
We are all ghosts now, H
ng. There is no more beauty. Perhaps Ðạo is the luckier one in the end
.”

H
ng sank onto his mattress in despair. In keeping his shop open he had been performing a vigil, keeping hope alive. He had been wilfully naive. Ðạo was gone, Phan Khôi had confirmed it. The world would never be the same.

It hardly mattered when Party officials came to requisition H
ng’s shop for their own use in 1959. H
ng’s remaining customers had nothing left to offer him except their tales of suffering. He had nothing left to offer them but rain and river water.

H
ng ran to the backroom and grabbed the
Nhân Van
magazines,
Fine Works of Spring
and
Autumn
, and all the handwritten poems he had accumulated over the years, quickly stuffing them into a burlap sack. The Party officials followed, pushing him out of the backroom and into the alleyway and claiming possession of the building, saying he would be charged as bourgeoisie if he did not simply walk away.

And so he’d walked away, but not simply. He’d walked to the shores of this muddy pond. He’d caught a duck, fed his neighbours, met a girl, shared Ðạo’s poetry. Then he’d sent a note to Ðạo’s wife and son in the village on the Sông C
River.